Richard Notkin ('70 Ceramics) has started work on a project that he plans to be completed the day that he dies, unfinished edges included. Notkin says that the unfinished edges are intentional, as it is an attempt to summarize the ongoing messages in his life’s output of art, basically, a plea for sanity. This is unfinished business that he now realizes must pass on to future generations.

“I realized many years ago that I would not make the teapot or sculpture that would save humanity. It will be a long-haul creative effort by millions of human beings in all walks of life, through many different endeavors. This piece is my final contribution to that effort," he said.

"It will start at its core and continue expanding outwards from there," Notkin said, talking about the not-yet-officially-named piece in generalities. "Really, it's an installation-sized project that I'll be working on for the rest of my life. The final piece may be table-sized, or it might fill an auditorium, depending on how long I remain active on this planet.”

This ongoing large-scale artwork is something of a departure for Notkin (although he is known for a half-dozen large scale ceramic relief tile murals created between 1999 and 2010). Notkin is best known for working with a tightly-controlled high degree of craftsmanship to create work often criticized as being "too small, tight and precious.”

The criticism would become a mantra, weaving through the 75-year-old artist's existence. He recently completed his fourth Visiting Artist stint at the Kansas City Art Institute in Foundations. The title of his class: “Creating the Ceramic Narrative:  small scale / BIG IDEA”

Richard Notkin, “Heart Teapot:  Internal Combustion Metamorphosis” --Yixing Series, 2013, Stoneware, luster, 6  1/2” x 12  1/2” x 5”

"Nowadays it's hard to get an artist to do something without a political message behind it," Notkin said. "What I always try to teach students is that it's the strength of the art that carries the message -- the message alone will not carry the art."

Ceramics were mostly viewed as functional when Notkin started working in clay at KCAI. In the late 1960s, injecting political messages were generally frowned upon. This was already Notkin's path. He became attracted to the exciting directions happening on the West Coast for a new generation of ceramic artists, and he subsequently moved to California, following his BFA from KCAI in 1970, and he received his MFA degree from UC/Davis in 1973.

Notkin began attending KCAI in the then revolutionary new Foundations Program in 1966. As he neared graduation (transferring into ceramics his senior year) all college-aged men were subject to the draft. Students could get deferments, but he recalls classmates getting inducted immediately after receiving their diplomas and getting sent to Vietnam. He remembers attending anti-war demonstrations, getting tear gassed, and even beaten during protests. He organized a group of three school buses of KCAI students and faculty to go Washington D.C. for the massive Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in November, 1969. “But,” he recalls, “My generation was no more altruistic than any other. It was mainly our survival instinct — it was our lives that were under threat of combat in Vietnam due to the compulsory military draft.” Still, that experience and his upbringing among several survivors of WWII’s European Holocaust and his father’s combat experiences deepened his passionate abhorrence of war and the resulting commentary in his art.

Author and ceramic artist Lisa Reinertson writes, “Richard Notkin’s social criticism carries the weight of outrage... presented in an exquisite package of great beauty and almost incomprehensible technical mastery… The power of the greatest of Goya’s social critiques delivered in the form of a functional teapot."

The teapot - a perhaps benign item to the layman - became Notkin's vehicle for narrative, channeling the spirit of Yixing wares of China (circa 1500 AD to the present).

Richard Notkin, “Hexagonal Curbside Teapot (Variation #17)” —Yixing Series, 1988, Stoneware, 5” x 8” x 4”

Inspiration also may have come from his youth on Chicago's South Side. His father was an immigration lawyer, consistently receiving gifts from his Chinese immigrant clients coming to America through Hong Kong, and many of these presents were Chinese ceramics. While a ceramics major studying under the legendary Professors Ken Ferguson and Victor Babu, Notkin remembers their great respect for Asian ceramic art, and their field trips to the amazing collections of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, so conveniently located to KCAI.

Notkin, however, also notes his attraction to the form of the teapot, and the unique unglazed clays of Yixing. "My choice of the teapot is simply because out of all ceramic vessels, it is the most complex consisting of the body, handle, spout, lid, knob, and sometimes feet. I have the widest range of elements from which to choose and visualize various imagery," he said, referencing potential narrative features, a common trait in the Yixing wares of China, many of which share this narrative aspect. And the sheer amount of fine detail I began to carve into the surface of the clay needed no glaze to cover its richness, it only required a clay body with its own unique beauty and depth. Such are the various fine-grained stonewares of Yixing."

Richard Notkin, "Teaset - Iraq 2007” - Yixing Series, 2007, Stoneware, glaze, Teapot:  11  1/2" x 7" x 4  1/4”, Cups:  Heights vary, 4" to 5  1/2”

Notkin chooses and juxtaposes images as a poet might compose words. A skull. A heart. A mushroom cloud. Dice, nuts, whatever he feels appropriate to his current artwork. These are examples of imagery Notkin uses in his teapots, vessels and sculptures that — coupled with a provocative and often ironic title — create a narrative. That doesn't mean there's a long and involved story. Instead, he chooses images that would be universally understood, that transcend our different cultures, and express passions he believes he shares with like-minded human beings around our planet — referencing global conflict, the insanity of nuclear weaponry, and, increasingly, the threat to future generations from global warming.

Quoting Notkin's decades-old artist's statement: “We have stumbled into the 21st Century with the technologies of Star Wars and the emotional maturity of cavemen. The problems of human civilization are far too complex to be solved by means of explosive devices.”

But he's not without hope for the future. Focused on supporting today’s students, he and his wife, Phoebe Toland, a painter and printmaker, sponsor a Kansas City Art Institute ceramics scholarship in his late parents’ names, Nathan and Thelma Notkin.

Foundation Studies, Spring Workshop 2024, “Creating the Ceramic Narrative:  small scale / BIG IDEA”, Instructor:  Richard Notkin

He also says that campus has changed immensely since he attended. This was the second time he has had the experience of working with Aldo Bachetti and the crew in the Beals Studio, where Notkin has experimented with altering some of his imagery through 3D digital fabrication technologies, something unimaginable in the 1960’s. He notes that the Ceramics Department also remains strong, with a great faculty, national reputation and expanded and improved facilities. While working this spring semester as an adjunct professor he said he was "flabbergasted" by the new dorm and happily admits that the food is superlatively better than when he was a student.

During an aside - after talking about his final planned artwork - he recalled how dogs were once allowed on campus, sort of.

"My basset hound 'Ferdie' would frolic with the other student dogs while I was in class," he said. "When 'Ferdie' died I buried him in a secret place on campus that I won't reveal," he said in a disclosure not yet committed to a teapot.

KCAI Faculty Photo (2023)